Library Technology

Whenever there is an opportunity to learn more about the people on the other side of the screen you should take it. I am referring to ordinary people with a malicious agenda who have the skills that enable them to get around ordinary security settings. They are continually testing the vulnerabilities of your Operating System. They prey on ordinary computer, especially users who aren’t aware of the danger lurking around the corner. That doesn’t mean attacks and malware intrusion incidents only occur to computer users who don’t know better, they really can happen to anyone.

If you are connected to the internet you are vulnerable. It is possible to put into place monitoring software that detects what it perceives to be suspicious activity. You can put into place Firewalls that prevent basic attacks, and demand that your computer stops every little change from happening on your computer. But… users get annoyed very quickly when they are asked to approve every action they take. After awhile you don’t even notice the box in the corner asking you to approve something with a name you don’t even recognize, but is associated with an action you just took. The best thing to do is to ask yourself if you really did just do something that would require a change in your system.

Unfortunately their are programs that you have installed that update themselves automatically. The problem here is that you may find yourself preventing a normal installation. It can be even worse if you stop the process mid-way through an installation and your program is left hanging.

If you are at work and you are notified by your Virus Protection system that something bad has been detected then you should immediately notify your IT team. They might not be able to save any of your data, but they can stop your computer from spreading its sickness to others. Make sure that you have a regular backup schedule for your important files.

I plan on going to a class that UF is offering on March 23rd called: Cyber Awareness

I recommend everyone going to a similar instructional seminar if it is offered. Do not convince yourself that you know enough already. There is no such thing as knowing too much about internet security.

If you are reading this at UF and before March 23rd. Please follow this link and sign up for the class

http://friendfeed.com

FriendFeed (ff) aggregates all of the RSS feed that you generate through the course of time into one place (twitter, blogs, netflix, and many others)

Once you subscribe to other user’s friendfeed accounts you can start viewing the accumulation of their life online.

You have the ability to comment on anyone’s shared item. If you liked what they have to say then you can very simply indicate this.

Taking any action on a shared item pushes that item back to the top of a shared reverse chronological stream of everyone’s life.

Twitter Posts (tweets) will often start out in the twitter realm as simple posts only to become very involved conversation in friendfeed.

You can learn a lot by listening and sharing, and it also helps you stay in touch with friends and colleagues around the world.

Testing out twitter.

“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? Bloggers can use it as a mini-blogging tool. Developers can use the API to make Twitter tools of their own. Possibilities are endless!”

I think you really need to figure out which companion tools to use in order to derive benefit from this resource.

Examples:

cell phone texting
twhirl: “twhirl is a desktop twitter client, based on the Adobe AIR platform.“
IM
twitkit etc…

You also have to figure out some of the addons

@username =public replies to your followers/followed
#hashtags - a companion site that enables tagging of your tweets (I haven’t quite gotten it to work yet)

Trying out the bnew Google Toolbar.

“The new version of Google Toolbar for Firefox adds the features that were available only in the IE toolbar and a special bonus.”
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/12/google-toolbar-3-for-firefox.html

Already I notice that it doesn’t automatically copy the text I am highlighting on a page.